26 August 2010
 
Homework

(The disaster in progress. Photo Socotra)
 
I could not help myself. I overslept and could not even get to the Times with all the crazy summer stuff going on. My fingers twitched on the keypad and ...
 
Dammit, I did it again. I curse this addiction to the written word. There are other stories to tell, but I am clutched by the words of others.
 
"From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War,” by Jerry Della Femina, re-issued this year since Mad Men, in its fourth season, is modeled on it's real characters.
 
I heard an NPR interview with Della Femina, the legendary ad man from the 1960s. Hysterical interview about drink and sex and smoking on the job. I recall Dad being relieved when he got to be a boss that he could stop going to lunch.
 
My sister found him on the floor in the kitchen yesterday morning, with Mom trying to get him to his feet.
 
I can’t bear to think about that, so I thought of the NPR review of "Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir,” by Jennifer Mascia. Her old man was a drug dealer and murderer. Fascinating interview.
 
I can put away Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, since he won me back at the end of the book. I need to go back and unravel the secret but probably won’t. Worth a read, though.
 
 On the stack: Blood Oath, Blood River, Island Under the Sea, the last of which has made it to the tote bag to travel to the pool to hear Allende’s take on Haiti, where I spent just enough time, while the former of the Blood books recount a real trip up the Congo River by Tim Butcher into the newest Heart of Darkness, while the latter blood is Chris Farnsworth’s adventures of the President’s vampire.
 
Five or six Philip Kerr books about Bernie Gunther, the hard-boiled German private dick whose adventures in Nazi Germany are like potato chips, can’t read just one.
 
I am working with Mac on an alcohol-fueled oral history project, so related tomes have been bought or pulled out of deep storage: “Whirlwind,” Barrett Tillman’s exhaustive history of B-29 operations in the Pacific, “And I Was There” by Eddie Layton, Mac's Boss. “Double Edged Secrets: US Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II,” by Wilfred J. Holmes. "Jasper" Holmes is the guy who saved Mac's life by refusing to let him go on the USS Wahoo's last cruise.
 
Related professional reading: “Eye in the Sky” for book review in the Quarterly; trash fun with Martin Amis in “The Pregnant Widow” and Kingley Amis, his Dad, with “Lucky Jim” are both on the shelf, one step up, along with “A Visit from the Goon Squad. Everything needs to get put up since the maids are coming tomorrow and it always winds up resorting the stack like a bad poker hand.
 
Outside, I am on chapter four of Kraaken by China Mieville on the water-proof iPod in the pool, which took an hour and a half of paddling, a personal record, and which I hope to continue later this afternoon.
 
From the other stack by the bed, “City of Thieves,” David Benioff, on the siege of Leningrad told by an elderly couple in Florida; Sebastian Junger’s “War,” on real Afghanistan, wily old spook Alan Furst and his latest outing with “Spies of the Balkans.”
 
I am not going to get to most of them. But what the hell. I love summer and idle optimism.
 
Wait till I get back to the graveyard of unread books at Daedalus Books & Music. It is an online store like Amazon that sells thousands of quality bargain books, CDs, and DVDs for the independent reader and listener. Their brick-and mortar warehouse is over in Columbia, MD, and is air conditioned.
 
They say that print is dead, and it is all going digital, but I say screw it.
 
You can spend the day there, but you might want to take a wheelbarrow to get to checkout. It is the homework I enjoy.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!